Move Over Product Design, UX Is The Future

Editor's Note

2/17/14

Happy Presidents' Day! To celebrate, we're revisiting some of our most popular stories of the year. Enjoy.

For decades, the most successful businesses thrived on product innovation as the natural strategy to increase revenues, market share, and loyalty. Fast forward to 2014: today’s product innovations, and the growth they create, are often incremental, narrow, and fleeting. Take TVs or PCs—every competitor quickly matches the latest features, speed, brightness. As a result, companies are finding that returns from product efforts are harder to rely on. Among the Global Innovation 1000, R&D spending rose 5.8% last year, yet revenue for those companies increased less than 1%. Global competition and technological diffusion mean that competitors quickly catch up with most improvements, while the transparency of digital and social media also prompts consumers to quickly switch allegiance with each new alluring offer.

Enter: the experience.

Experience innovation will be a crucial component for companies seeking to remain relevant and retain customer loyalty.

Today’s enlightened leaders are achieving success by crafting the entire customer experience—shaping, innovating, branding, and measuring it. They are mastering a new discipline we refer to as "experience innovation" by going beyond the discrete product or service to reimagine the customer journey. The result yields new, unexpected, signature moments that delight customers and create significant opportunities for new growth.

We believe that experience innovation will be a crucial component for companies seeking to remain relevant and retain customer loyalty in 2014. But the process of designing a truly innovative experience cannot simply rest on the process excellence of classic customer experience-improvement efforts or the creative brilliance of the marketing team. Drawing on our recent work, here are a few key principles for success.

Experience innovation isn’t driven by specific product features or design, but by reimagining the broader experience of how customers might use the product or service. By looking beyond the product to take a broader view of customer issues and activities around the product, companies can find new ways to address unmet needs, create talk-worthiness, and fuel differentiation.

Take Uber, the car service. Uber didn’t change the vehicle or retrain drivers, but fundamentally changed how you order, meet, and pay for a car. By taking a broader view of what a car service could be, Uber was able to reimagine the entire experience—offering "relentless reliability," and a seamless system that addresses many hassles such as long wait time, not having cash, losing recipients, etc. The company is growing like wildfire—adding almost 80,000 new customers a week and is able to charge a lot more than the typical cab. Looking beyond the product to the broader experiences surrounding it also creates new horizons for growth. At Nike, for instance, shifting from sneakers to enabling fitness has spurred clothing sales, the Fuel band, and other integrated digital solutions, and fitness-oriented social media sharing and gamification.

Experience innovators recognize that consumers can’t tell you about the things they need or want but haven’t yet imagined. Nor can consumers articulate how they will do things differently in the future. For instance, customers will tell an airline they really want quick boarding and on-time departures.

Consumers can’t tell you about the things they need or want but haven’t yet imagined.

That’s fairly obvious. But Delta came up with an approach they call "delocation" as a way of taking services out of their typical location and improving the travel experience in unexpected ways. Delta brought the lounge directly to the gate, creating an enhanced experience among travelers who had never thought of the gate past its function as a waiting area and were often too rushed to visit the airline lounge. The Delta concourses at LaGuardia and Minneapolis have banquette seating, embedded iPads, gate side ordering, and specially curated shops and restaurants to create new levels of service and ambiance. The space takes advantage of Delta’s ability to partner and deliver on its essence of "making flying better" in a way consumers might never have articulated in a focus group—and provides an opportunity for a new revenue stream. Delta is an example of a brand that has committed to enhancing the experience on an ongoing basis and Delta’s stock price more than doubled in 2013.

Great experience innovation isn’t about a series of one-off moments, but a holistic vision for a transformed brand experience that evolves over time. A customer-experience map is, therefore, a bold, integrated vision for the future of your brand experience. Start with a broad and detailed exploration of the customer journey—and how it could be different. Don’t ask customers what they need, but observe how they behave and what makes them happy or sad. Then assess what people could do. Think about what they will notice, and what they will remember. Look for the big moves—can you take entire steps out of the process, change the sequence, add new value in unexpected places? Disney, for example, unexpectedly opens the park gates five minutes in advance fueling the "I’m about to be at Disney world!" thrill. In developing such a map, think in terms of a portfolio approach to execution, by balancing simple changes that build momentum with longer-term investments that require more radical changes and resourcing.

Today’s dramatically expanding set of touch points, shorter attention spans, and shrinking lifecycles all heighten the need for an experience that breaks through with increased vitality and dimension. In that vein, a great brand experience often engages all the senses. It considers the environmental, physical, digital, and even behavioral expression of brand—the way employees interact with both customers and each other.

Products are usually managed by one person, whereas an experience must be curated by several different owners with separate goals and metrics. Drawing on expertise across functions is essential to push thinking, discover what is possible, and forge connections across operational silos. And, before an experience will come across as real to the outside world, dozens, hundreds or thousands of employees need to be educated and empowered to deliver the vision.

The concept of innovating the experience isn’t new. Virgin’s airport clubs, Nike’s flagship stores, Starbucks restaurants, and Disney’s Parks set the standard many years ago. These innovators show us that the experience isn’t just about the planes, the shoes, the coffee or the even the rides—it’s about how we feel when we use the product or service. The stakes for getting the experience right, and continually enhancing it, have never been higher.

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26Comments

Agreeing with some of the commenters here, I find most of this article to be a retread of things we already know. As a designer who's been in communications and marketing for the better part of a quarter century, I'm starting to feel that (modern) UX is tiresomely overrated. Service Design would have been a more appropriate focal point.

Although I agree with the majority of this article, as already pointed out, this is nothing new. Firstly, the title is slightly misleading in its use of UX, which is generally seen as more digitally focused. Secondly, It also seems to indicated that UX is more important than the product. A focus on Service design would have been more appropriate as it is mostly seen as more holistic than UX. It focuses on how the service is delivered, the organisation behind that delivery, and puts equal emphasis on all digital and physical interactions, including the way it makes you ‘feel’ as well as the way it ‘works’.

'Experience Innovation' can be used in all sorts of ways but surely Delta have missed a trick with their execution; looks like the last place i'd went to spend anytime! We are simple beings, make places I want to spend time!

The only thing that I don't agree with is that any of this is new. Great brands have been designing great experiences for decades. Here's a look at two that have been getting it right for a long time: http://www.nocturnaldesign.com/blog/?p=222

Is it not an attribute of product itself.. I mean why do we want to believe that when we say product design it refers to just technology and engineering..
I say that with time the common understanding of terminologies have changed... and also with a growing competitive world we have to go deeper till we really breakdown and start focusing on small sections and forget the whole..
From product, to graphic and industrial designers to user experience and interaction designer... and then we say move over...
Even the data in the opening para is too hyped ... Although it may be a fact... true.. but wait doesn't even Pareto principle say that.. and what are patents for if anyone could just simply catchup.. and why can't one do so in case of providing better user experience
I sugggest "Consider UX and make products better".
http://www.ted.com/conversations/14510/debate_you_cannot_design_an.htmlhttp://uxdesign.smashingmagazine.com/2011/03/15/why-user-experience-cannot-be-designed/

Thanks for sharing this interesting write-up. Few of the examples quoted are very interesting. However, wasn't #UX part of the Product Design already? "Experience Innovation" sounds like a word coming out a power point prepared to get additional budget allocated for the new expensive UX designer recently hired. Points that you mention are kind of inherent to a good product design and if companies are not doing it already then clearly they didn't get it right in the first place.

This is great! I agree that UX is THE next big thing to hit branding. Brands are going to have to start connecting with their audience in the real world in order to remain relevant. We live in a world of instant gratification and short attention, so creating an even greater experience will be key.

Hello!? Branding agencies just need to find a decent product design agency to partner with as they've been doing this for years. Try walking into IDEO and telling them this is THE next big thing... They're some of the people who invented the tools you might use to do this.

Good article, but perhaps over-egging the pudding. Yes the user experience is vital to great products, software and systems. But great experiences need great product development to support them (where products are involved).

Branding agencies love this "new idea" because they can get involved without having to do the hard technical bit. But it's more interesting to bring human experience and great engineering together into a beautifully unified "one". Product Designers have been pushing this agenda for decades - start with understanding the user's real life, before designing solutions - which often results in new service design concepts. But convincing clients is often the hardest part as this requires so much more mental change. But "Move Over Product Design"? No. That would be missing the point.

Good point. Maybe the terminologies are a bit misleading as UX is being widely misunderstood (!) for being reserved for the digital world only. Maybe Service Design indeed would be more appropriate in this context. Secondly I believe the usual fastco reader is aware of the necessary shift towards experience and service design thinking (not saying that - if the objective is to design a tangible product - the final product should not work properly and has to be designed well).
Articles like this have to be published in The Economist, Financial Times etc to reach the right audience.